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The 5 Shortest Articles Ever Written in the History of Science!
Most researchers think that a scientific article or research paper should be long. Contrary to this common belief, what matters in a research article is not how long the article is, but how important the impact per word is. In other words, being able to say a lot in a few words is the most important thing. To support these thoughts, we will tell you about the 5 shortest scientific articles ever written. While explaining the articles, we would like to note that we have made the ranking from the article with the shortest body except the title to the longest.
An Empty Psychology Article: Writer’s Block!
The shortest article in the history of science is the article entitled “The Failure of Self-Treatment of a Case of Writer’s Block”. it was published in 1974 by clinical psychologist Dennis Upper in The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. This journal is considered number 54 among the journals published in the field of applied psychology by the Decimago Journal Rank site. The most interesting thing about the article is that it does not use a single word in its body, except for the title and a funny footnote. Yes, you didn’t read it wrong: This article is written with zero words! Another interesting aspect of the article is that it has shown that scientific articles can be made with humor against those who think that there is a constant serious environment in the scientific world.
The only part that will help us to understand this article is the title of the article. As it can be understood, the topic is related to “writer’s block” (or, in other words, “fear of empty pages”). Writer’s block is a situation when a talented writer with a desire to write becomes unable to write on grounds such as loss of inspiration, inability to produce the next sentence. It is a disturbing cognitive problem seen both in writers who write in the fiction genre, such as science fiction, and in writers who work in the non-fiction field, such as scientific articles. The term ”writer’s block” was first used by the American psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler in the 1940s, and later this usage became…
